DISCLAIMER: Arch Linux is not a beginner friendly distribution, and this is not a recommendation or good practice.
I know how to use pacman -S. I have yet to experience a Discover related issue after months of use.
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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Installing something on arch is easy imo. The CLI is simple and well enough documented, and the package build system is easy to use. For comparison with ubuntu:
pacman -S nameis not harder thanapt install name. And try to install something on ubuntu if it's not in the official package repos.Eh, it's a teensy bit harder, since you have to remember what -S means, rather than the easy to remember and plain English 'install'. But, yeah, not much of a difference.
1: Go to that something's website.
2: look for their download/install instructions page, scroll to Linux instructions if necessary.
3: Install instructions for Debian/Ubuntu are usually the first one listed, and typically just consist of a few commands you can copy and paste over without modifying.
It isn't particularly difficult in most cases.
Thanks! I initially thought about writing this in my comment in parentheses, but then didn't do because it would've made the comment longer, and I'm not sure if other people want to read the pedantic truth anyways. I'm glad you filled this void.
The instructions for installing on ubuntu only work because of ubuntu's popularity. Also if you can copy-paste commands, you can also just follow build instructions. In arch, these commands are in the PKGBUILD, you don't have to copy them manually. Plus you have the knowledge that you'll have something that you can also deinstall later. Applications' websites usually don't have uninstallation instructions.
Glad my pedantry could be of service, lol!
True, but this is still a very real effect with real-world benefits.
(And I wouldn't necessarily say it's just Ubuntu's popularity. More like, due to Debian and Debian derivatives' popularity, of which Ubuntu is one. Since there are so many popular distros out there that are Debian-based where Debian-style install instructions will work (and quite a few people running Debian itself), it makes sense to give Debian-style install instructions first.)
In my experience, not so much.
Because even if you follow the instructions exactly, you'll always run into some problem due to your build environment not being quite identical to the developer's build environment, some library being half a version number off, and then cmake fails with a cryptic error message. So then you downgrade that library to the older version and try again, and this time it fails with a different cryptic error message that you can't make any sense of at all this time, or the compiler quits because it says the code is formatted improperly on line 1437 and now you're left wondering whether it's an issue with your compiler or whether you should go in and edit the source code yourself to try and fix that supposed formatting error...
I don't know... I've tried this approach a few times -- usually as a desperate last resort -- and it never seems to actually work. In theory, it should. In practice ... good fucking luck.
4: those commands were written for previous version of Ubuntu and now dependency tree doesn't compute, also one of the commands is to add their custom repo, and you don't have keys for it so it doesn't work anyway. You try to remove the bad repo and now your apt is all fucked. You regenerate your repo list, googled the package and your version name, random stackexchage page gave you their live repo, but it needs a newer version of a library that incompatible with 54 of something that you already have. You learn about snap, installed 43Gb of something, it exists but still doesn't really work because package maintaiers didn't actually move it to snap, it was someone else. By this point you copy-pasted so many commands into your terminal you afraid it gained sentience. You call your more computer literate friend, he starts saying something about incompatible dependancies, containers, and you don't really understand much. By the end, you decide that you didn't actually want the software.
Later you discover that your sound doesn't work anymore, and there is an error when you reboot.
Good ending: you installed Arch, installed
yayand instead of remembering unmemorable-Syou just doyay package_nameand you're very happy with your choices.Always read the PKGBUILD before running makepkg!